Department ofMathematics

Student seminar

This seminar is designed to have faculty do small lectures to start conversations on advanced mathematics. These talks will be accessible to undergraduate students and cover a wide range of topics. For the Spring 2017 semester, we will meet in NAC 5/150 from 1:00PM-2:00PM on Thursdays.

Most recent talks

Thursday, February 23, 2017, 01:00PM,
NAC 5/150

Paul Mucciarone (St. John's School of Risk Management),
Recruiting for the MS in Actuarial Science

Have you considered becoming an actuary? St. John’s University has a four-semester program designed specifically to help you launch your career in this lucrative and rewarding field.

The MS in Actuarial Science will enhance your critical and analytical thinking while preparing you to succeed on professional actuarial exams. St. John’s also has individualized career services, a wide range of corporate connections and generous scholarship opportunities.

Paul Mucciarone is the assistant director of admissions for St. John’s School of Risk Management. He will be leading the discussion on Thursday, February 23rd at 1:00 pm

Thursday, December 08, 2016, 01:15PM,
NAC 4/148

Prof. Samuel Van Gool (CCNY Math Department),
A Taste of Logic

I will discuss a few logic puzzles (easy to state, not so easy to solve), and show how these are related to current research in math and computer science.

We are all familiar with the Pythagorean Theorem, and perhaps with methods of constructing right triangles with all rational sides. While a right triangle with rational sides will always have rational area, does this work the other way round? For a given rational number n, can we find a right triangle with all sides rational that has area n? Not always---but this isn't obvious! If we can find such a triangle, we call the number n "congruent”. In the quest to discover which n are congruent, we will encounter elliptic curves and their group structure, and maybe even mention the elusive Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture.